My dream customer: He never complains, has rebilled for 10-plus years, yet still logs in regularly. He lives vicariously through Dirty D and has pleasured himself countless times to my creative perversions. Loves what we do, yet never sends an email or requires any specific attention at all.

My nightmare customer: The one that tries to download the entire members area as fast as possible. He wants to cancel before the two-day trial converts to a monthly sale. Probably canceled before he logged in. Starts hundreds of download threads at once attempting to grab 1+TB of video/pics representing 10-plus years of exclusive content and an investment of millions of dollars (all for $2.95). Oops, that didn’t work; we have bandwidth limits. Now I just need to brace myself for the chargeback.

Q. Boyer, Marketing Coordinator, Pink Visual/TopBucks.com:

My ideal customer is long term, low hassle and genuinely happy to be my customer. They would be a consumer who loves our product, is satisfied with our service, is well-versed in the online environment, and understands how their own devices and systems work, be they browsing via a PC or surfing on a smart phone.

The nightmare customer comes in many forms ... But as the people on the provider side of the equation, adult businesses have a major role to play in creating the dream customer, obviously. If you run a scam outfit, then no customer will be a dream; they will all be rightfully unsatisfied with your products and services. If you run your shop as a legitimate business, however, and treat your customers well, the nightmares will be fewer and farther between. So it’s not just about the customer’s nature; it’s about YOUR nature, too.

Colin Rowntree, Wasteland.com:

Over the last 15 years of running Wasteland, oftentimes our nightmare customer becomes our dream customer. This scenario generally unfolds when a new member (frequently a senior citizen) with a great deal of BDSM experience but hardly any computer skills contacts us, saying, “I can’t make the movies play.” Once we get these customers on the phone, their problems are generally squared away within ten minutes and they are both overjoyed and grateful that someone actually took the time to help them. In person.

Here is where the “dream transformation” comes into play: These members are now loyal. They send new ideas for scenes. They get in touch with us if something is broken. In one case, a technically challenged members was also a cabinetmaker. We now have a joint project where he works with me to design bondage furniture: We build them; he compiles the blueprints and parts list into This Old Dungeon how-to kits, for sale as Kindle e-books.